Loading problem when too many participants enter at once?

[Stephen Politzer-Ahles]

I put an experiment (https://farm.pcibex.net/r/hYqKtB/) on Prolific for about 200 people, after having done test runs with 5 people and then with 20 people. When I opened it up for 200, I suddenly got a lot of people notifying me that the experiment wouldn’t open or got stuck on the loading screen (some of them later told me that after loading for several minutes it did finally work). I wasn’t able to replicate the problem myself (I tried the data-collection link on my end and it loaded right away), but enough people were reporting this problem to me that I believe them. Is there a known issue that one experiment having a lot of people in it at once can cause loading issues? Other than that, I don’t know if maybe the farm was just unluckily having a slowdown for just those few minutes and got better after that. (FWIW, after maybe around 15 minutes of that I did stop noticing so many complaints about the site not working; I guess that’s consistent both the possibility that it was a temporary server problem that went away, and with the possibility that there were too many people in the beginning but once like a hundred finished and there were fewer people left then things got better…)

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